July 30, 2014

In 2002, director Richard Linklater began a remarkable movie-making experiment known as The Twelve Year Project. The idea: to make a series of short films, one per year, following a boy’s growth from age 6 to 18—from first grade to college freshman—using the same cast each year, with the intention of cutting the footage together into a feature film.

The result is BOYHOOD, one of the most engaging and flat-out fascinating films ever made. It’s one thing to dream up such an ambitious project. It’s another to pull off the logistics and make it come together as a story. From concept to execution, Boyhood is a thrilling piece of art.

Ellar Coltrane stars as the boy, Mason, appearing in initial scenes as a typical 6-year-old, playful and vulnerable. Mason’s parents, portrayed by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, have split up. Olivia is introduced as a harried single mom, loving and committed but perhaps resentful of losing her freewheeling twenties to early parenthood. Mason Sr. is the absent dad, just returned from adventures in Alaska.

Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei Linklater, takes the fourth main role as Mason’s older sister Samantha, and we watch her grow up, too. Every ten minutes or so, the timeline bumps up a year. It’s an uncanny sensation to watch those early scenes and realize that they were shot more than a decade ago. As the early-2000s cultural signifiers roll by—Harry Potter at the multiplex, Roger Clemens on the mound—the film narrows its focus on Mason and his broken family.

The kids get taller and thinner, the grown-ups sadder and wiser. Olivia goes back to school and subjects the children to some truly awful stepdads. Mason Sr. settles down and finds that responsibility isn’t all that bad. The kids become teenagers and discover sex, drugs and heartbreak. Everyone does the best they can.

As with Michael Apted’s Up documentary series, which has profiled a group of British people every seven years since 1964, it’s a time-lapse view of human lives unfolding. The best cutting-edge digital technology or makeup artistry could never achieve what Linklater does here.

Even the most vérité films have subtle layers of artifice that we learn to accept almost subconsciously. We suspend our disbelief. Linklater’s grand experiment, using the same actors over 12 years in a narrative film, tinkers with the fundamentals of cinematic storytelling. It registers somewhere back in the brain stem that we’re watching real people age and change through time.

This would just be a gimmick if it weren’t executed with such artistry. But because the story is so strong, the dialogue so natural and the performances so uniformly excellent, something is essentially altered.Boyhood doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like something altogether different. I suspect that the next generation of film scholars will be flagging this one in the books, or holo-archives, or whatever the future may hold.

July 27, 2014

The 9/11 attacks were largely planned in the German port city of Hamburg. It was here that the terror cell led by Mohamed Atta first made contact with Al-Qaeda, in the late-’90s, from an apartment that was being monitored by both the CIA and German intelligence agencies.

We’re reminded of these facts in the opening title cards of director Anton Corbijn’s tense and paranoid espionage thriller A MOST WANTED MAN. Based on the 2008 John le Carré novel of the same name, the film is set in today’s Hamburg, where past intelligence failures haunt the conscience of veteran anti-terror field agent Günther Bachmann.

Bachmann is played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his last roles. Both the character and the actor have clearly been living hard. Pale and heavy, drink perpetually in hand, Bachmann moves with the slow, ponderous gravity of a rogue planet.

When a Chechen refugee named Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) arrives in the city, Bachmann’s antennae twitch. Karpov takes shelter in Hamburg’s Muslim community and lays claim to an inheritance, worth 10 million Euros, at a bank run by Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe).

Other intriguing characters drop into the story: An Islamic philanthropist (Homayoun Ershadi) who may not be as philanthropic as he seems, an earnest civil rights attorney (Rachel McAdams) who takes up Issa’s cause and a suspiciously helpful CIA agent (Robin Wright).

Corbijn (director of The American) manages the twists and turns with casual storytelling confidence. In a cerebral spy thriller, the trick is to maintain suspense with disciplined disclosure of information. Scenes are carefully assembled and sequenced to provide the audience with what it needs to know—and nothing more.

Tension is generated not with gun fights or chase scenes, but with anxious rendezvous in bleak locales—a dilapidated river ferry, a basement pub. Well, there’s one chase scene through a strobe-lit disco, which is apparently de rigueur in European thrillers. But if I remember correctly, there are no guns fired in the entire movie.

You need heavyweight performers to pull this off, and that’s what we get with Hoffman, Dobrygin, Dafoe and especially Wright, who projects lethal iciness beneath her calm professionalism (and alarming haircut). We also get some intriguing specifics on the actual process of international money laundering.

The script has some structural problems, though. Because the players keep their cards concealed for so long, the movie has no active villain for most of its running time. It’s often unclear why Bachmann is pursuing his investigation. When the double-crosses do land, the impact is blunted by lingering ambiguities, both moral and narrative.

It’s hard to get more specific without spoiling things, but le Carré’s source novel was built around a very specific critique, which is almost entirely absent here. And if you see the film, which I recommend, ask yourself this: Wouldn’t a bogus check have solved everything in 10 minutes?